Louis Theroux

As we all know, Christmas was originally established so that shops could sell more things.  This is back when there were shops, though.  Historical times when there was an economy and EU membership.  By calling their wares presents and saying everyone had to give something to all the people they knew, once-mighty shops vacuumed up our cash (also consigned to the past, thankfully, which will make switching to the euro easier when we re-join the EU) while we skipped home with unnecessary trinkets to wrap, hide under tree branches, and then distribute to relatives before a turkey dinner and some TV, or an argument.  This traditional meaning has of course been forgotten now, partly because things were better in the olden days (especially WWII), but also because there’s a new meaning in town: the birth of baby Jesus.  Even though his mum was a virgin, this infant founded a religion that millions follow to this very day.  Some of my favourite followers are the members of the Westboro Baptist Church.  What this waffle means to say is that I always think of them at Christmas (even though they dismiss the festival as being too paganistic).  So, while holed up at my parents’, a tier 4 refugee airlifted out of London lest I miss any of the above rejoicing, I cracked out my laptop, logged onto the BBC iPlayer, and reminded myself of the documentaries Louis Theroux had made about them.

For those slow on the uptake, let me just confirm that Louis Theroux is the boxset we’ll be discussing in this week’s blog.  And those quick on the uptake will be pointing out to me that he is in fact a man rather than a boxset.  While his programmes over the years have taken such monikers as Altered States or When Louis Met, the editors and I (actually just me) have decided to treat his whole oeuvre as one boxset here.  The fact is: it’s my blog and I can make up whatever rules I want.  But, more importantly, this really is the best way to tackle a career coming up for thirty years of quality output.

We’ll start with his Weird Weekends, first broadcast when I was a wee lad of twelve and already watching things I shouldn’t have been.  Young Louis himself is a bit of a gangly smirker, embedding himself in fringe communities focused on either extreme views or extreme ways of life or some combination of both.  What unites all he comes across is their unshakeable conviction that they have found the ultimate life hack.  Whether a career making money in porn, or navigating marriage up-spicing with swinging parties, his subjects wax lyrical about the benefits of their lifestyle choices.  What helps matters is that most of his weird weekenders are Americans (from that wild land that, to British people, is where telly comes from) all too eager to show off their certainty.  Unto them, however, Louis casts no judgment.  While the whites of his eyes might betray some consternation, his questioning simply offers a length of rope by which they all ultimately unravel themselves.  Instead of jumping in once they have finished speaking, Louis pauses.  His garrulous new pals can’t help but fill the gap, eventually talking themselves almost out of their own flag-waving beliefs.  It’s glorious content you can find on Netflix and, even though it looks like it was filmed on tracing paper when compared to their modern gloss, it’s still utterly compelling.

We then move into When Louis Met territory, a small number of episodes that get under the skin of a variety of prominent Brits who can only really be described as naff.  Some are treasures like Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee or Chris Eubank, and others pose more sinister figures, like Anne Widdecombe and Max Clifford.  Most notorious of all is telly paedo Jimmy Savile and you can’t help but imagine a kiddie porn dungeon behind every unopened door in his home.  For me, though, a highlight is the haranguing of the Hamiltons, as Christine’s self-care wine servings offer great lubrication to the antics that abound.

Both the above have occasionally been reviewed as exploitative and, as a viewer, you can’t help but recoil at others embarrassing themselves.  That said, participation is clearly voluntary, and we must each earn our fifteen minutes of fame as best we can.  Look at me: writing the 180^th entry in an unpopular blog.

Between 2003 and the present day, Louis sporadically treats us to one of his BBC Two specials.  More global in subject matter (though still always best in the USA), broader themes are investigated, but still in characteristically extreme circumstances.  Law and (dis)order figure heavily, with the mind-blowing double on the Miami Mega Jail haunting my memory.  Linked to this are explorations of addictive behaviour.  The City Addicted To Crystal Meth remains truly shocking, with Theroux’s calm presence drawing out gasp-inducing frankness from addicts.  His same style in Talking To Anorexia similarly sees him hide his own discomfort in order to provide fragile girls with a platform through which to process their irreconcilable behaviour.  Tragedy looms large and Theroux will return to subjects to track their progress only to find that things haven’t turned out as planned, Twilight Of The Porn Stars being a particular example.

I would also commend our man’s bravery.  In America’s Most Dangerous Pets, he unearths a pre-Tiger King Joe Exotic and remains calm in the face of some harrowing animal encounters.  But 2007’s visit to The Most Hated Family In America stands out as the best example of Theroux’s willingness to stick his head in the lion’s mouth.  We’re back the Westboro Baptist Church of my introduction, a bible-inspired hate group who achieved notoriety by picketing the funerals of dead soldiers with offensive (and poorly illustrated) signs blaming all of America’s problems on sodomy.  Louis is hosted by the charismatic Shirley Phelps-Roper, daughter of the church’s founder and committed member, happy to shout down his ludicrous questions about whether she has to be so nasty to everyone.  With Theroux, we stand by while she runs her household of eleven kids with maternal tenderness, making sure they are clear about who will burn in eternal hellfire (everybody else) and who won’t (them and them alone).

In 2011, Louis returns to the Phelps in America’s Most Hated Family In Crisis, quizzing them about departed members who have come to reject the group’s ministry but also noticing that their infamy has attracted new converts.  This brings me to the highlight of this year’s festive period for me: uncovering a third documentary in this series.  Surviving America’s Most Hated Family interviews, among others, Shirley’s own estranged daughter, Megan Phelps-Roper.  In earlier documentaries, she embodies the unwavering conviction that characterises Theroux’s subjects.  To see such a sensible young lady calmly spout vitriol offers an insight into human potential that scripted drama often fails to approximate.  But, as she details in her book that I happened to be reading at the same time, Unfollow, she began to uncover inconsistencies in the doctrine the church promoted.  The arguments on Twitter that had so thrilled her started to persuade her.  Now, here she is, talking to Louis Theroux and the whole world about treating fellow humans with compassion and kindness, rather than shouting at them while they bury their dead, holding aloft illustrations of stickmen penetrating each other.

Conversely, Louis of later years does start to take exception to his subjects’ beliefs, almost speeding up the process whereby they formally unravelled themselves independently and prodding them more impatiently to agree that, yes, they’re being a bit silly and should probably stop it.  A father in his fifties, should we worry that Theroux is becoming the more conservative older gent so many of us are sadly destined to turn into?  Probably not, as he does concede where convinced, and he ultimately comes from a place of compassion and understanding.  There appears a genuine worry for the wellbeing of those involved.  In my eyes, he can do no wrong.  I’ve devoured his compelling podcast series, Grounded, and am fairly certain we will one day be the best of pals.  And with that, he enters into the folklore of Just One More Episode, alongside 179 of my most important boxsets.

Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons

Hi everyone and welcome to my insurance post.  Due to unforeseen apathy on my part, I’ve not managed to finish watching anything new in time to uncover a sexy boxset this week.  I’ve had lots of recommendations, and am halfway through a few things myself, but since riding high as an early adopter of Industry (you’re welcome) I’m having to raid my annals (not a euphemism) for something I consumed a while back and didn’t deem worthy of a post at the time.  Christmas might be on the way (or cancelled) but this week we’re swerving the single-use festivities in favour of going Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons.  Will loyal fans of the blog dismiss this as a show too obscure to warrant reading about, or will it turn out, as I suspect from this Netflix documentary’s appearance in the UK top ten when new episodes appeared earlier this year, that I’ll have a post worthy of rivalling some of my most-read musings (the top three in order: Love Island, Naked Attraction, Bo’ Selecta!)?

By now we’re familiar with my theory that prisons offer great narrative tension to any drama.  It elevated all the nonsensically earnest dialogue of Prison Break.  It created a sample population of wronged women among whom the lady fluff of Orange Is The New Black deftly metamorphosed into acerbic social commentary.  It even gave some much-needed edge to Archie Andrews in Riverdale.  But what of real-life prisons, I hear you ask.  And what about prisons abroad, I also hear you follow up with in order to help me segue effortlessly into our focus this week.  Well, Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons tells you all about them.  We’ve all seen headlines bemoaning the UK’s soft-touch criminal justice system, and of course Brexit will now allow those clamouring hardliners to enjoy sufficient sovereignty to purge individuals from society in whatever manner they see fit.  We have also heard tell of the horrors of third-world jails where many a Westerner has come a cropper for accidentally stumbling over a border after losing little packets of drugs up their bottoms.  How long must we wait to look inside them (the prisons, not the bottoms)?!

Finally, then, in 2016, Channel 5 were brave enough to send a film crew to four such hellholes, pushing ahead of them as a shield plucky journalist Paul Connolly who, under the documentary’s premise, would actually become an inmate at these institutions in order to get behind the bars and under the skin of what’s really going on.  From continent to continent, the findings are disturbingly similar: overcrowding, drug addiction, corruption, unsanitary conditions and violence.  A natural response is to swear off a life a crime, but luckily I hadn’t been planning one.  Two years later, Netflix launched a second series, bringing in the energy of Raphael Rowe for hosting duties, whizzing him round the world on a punishing sequence of gap years across a total of three further seasons.  Maybe Connolly didn’t fancy any more toughness, but it didn’t matter as Rowe outqualified him, having spent a decade imprisoned for crimes he didn’t commit.  Don’t worry if you don’t remember this bit as he’ll remind you at the start of every episode.

Bringing in real prison toughness, Rowe is all too eager to get among things.  Like his predecessor, he commits to the process of becoming a prisoner, undergoing humiliating strip searches on arrival.  As series progress, you start to twig that the guards aren’t that bothered about this and it’s in fact the production team insisting on a naked cavity search.  Rowe can’t pop his trousers off quick enough.  Once inside, we can have a proper look around.  It’s an extreme version of poverty porn.  In Paraguay, men rifle through rubbish or inject drugs in the open air.  In Belize, they trade in performative Christian faith against privileges.  In Papua New Guinea, the constant threat of violence is palpable.  But it’s not all doom and gloom, as we’re also granted access to some of the world’s least tough prisons and although this makes a lie of the show’s titles, it’s just as interesting to see how Germany focuses on therapy or Norway on preparation for normal life in order to prevent recidivism.

Whether Rowe really gets locked in overnight doesn’t really matter.  He absorbs enough exposure to draw conclusions that recognise the complexity of punishing criminal behaviour.  As a classic Brit abroad, his refusal ever to learn the native language (even a few more words of Spanish would help him in his South and Central American jaunts that dominate his schedule) poses no threat to his discussions with helpful inmates.  His questions are asked with childlike wonder, as if a slightly babyish voice and naïve frown can transcend Quechua.  Hats, and trousers, off to him though: he’s rarely fazed.  His greatest moment of worry seems to come in Lesotho where inmates suggest they might make a prison wife of him.  While it’s unlikely any wicked ways would have been had while the camera crew and production team watch on, Rowe has never moved as fast as he does when evading their friendly clutches.

Having had our nosey around, we feel safe in the knowledge we’ll never have to be confined to any of these places in real life.  It’s hard to feel optimistic about the UK as it self-destructs out of the EU, but at least there’s probably central heating in most of our prisons.  For now.  This show’s strength, therefore, comes from its ability to make our own lives seem less appalling, if only by comparison.  As we trip in and out of lockdowns, spending more time indoors than we ever thought possible, we may count our blessings that this isn’t in fact a day made up of 23 hours of isolation, but a great time to catch up on all sorts of Netflix documentaries.

The Last Dance

These days, retail is something that happens online while we’re sequestered indoors, leaving the UK’s shopping streets barren and foreboding (like our future outside the EU).  Back in retail’s nineties heyday, our greatest weekend treat was being taken to the Bentalls shopping centre in Kingston for a good old browse.  Of all the pointless branches on its many glistening floors, the enormous Warner Bros Studio Store lives on in my memory as the most extravagant of them all.  A whole shop dedicated solely to merchandise with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck on it.  Looking for a leather jacket with the Tasmanian Devil on it?  They had it in three colours of course.  Among the shiny trinkets and branded apparel, whole displays dedicated to Space Jam loomed large.  My eleven-year-old self wondered what be this mysterious film?  The animated characters I knew, but my Surrey childhood meant that Michael Jordan was an unknown entity to me.  Fast forward twenty-four years to this summer and I still hadn’t seen Space Jam, but everyone at my gym was gushing on about a new Netflix documentary on a basketball dream team with a banging soundtrack.  Not being one for team ball sports, I waited patiently until conversation turned so we could speak about something else.  Months later, I saw that The Last Dance had an IMDb rating of 9.2 and decided I had to watch it, if only to guarantee to myself that I could consume a high-quality boxset after devouring Industry.

I admit that I initially felt some regret at my decision.  Not only was this clearly all about sport, but it was about some very specific things to do with that sport.  Luckily, these were glamorous American sports from abroad, not the endlessly ubiquitous soccer that constitutes half of all “news” in the UK (the other half being articles about why immigrants have ruined your life).  Basketball was even a sport I had seen in real life during a 2012 trip to New York when a beloved pal got us tickets to see the Knicks at Madison Square Gardens.  The oversize foam finger was just one of many highlights, with the speed of play, the high scores and the party atmosphere all making for a very entertaining spot of spectating.  But The Last Dance is all about the Chicago Bulls’ mid-nineties team and their ability to win successive NBA championships.  Our main narrative plays out around the 1998 season with our Bulls going for their sixth title (and second run of hattricks), but each of the ten episodes whizzes back and forth in time to fill in the backgrounds on different players’ careers, the team’s earlier fortunes and their overall approach to the championships they had previously won.  It’s a kind of lottery of early nineties years, but there’s a helpful graphic of a timeline by which to orientate yourself.

Instead of whiplash, though, I was gradually and irresistibly drawn in until I was powerless against a characteristic compulsion to get to the end.  What bolstered the intrigue?  Firstly, the multiple first-hand accounts from key players and onlookers involved at the time, told as pieces to camera with the frankness and the perspective only twentysomething years of intervening life can give you.  Secondly, the footage from the actual time, when a camera crew had unprecedented access to the Bulls’ legendary team, offered further unique insight, as if the whole programme was planned as a follow-up almost a quarter of a century later.  What’s more, for the non-sports fan, you’re excused the commitment of sitting through seasons and seasons of matches and simply shown montage after montage of breath-taking steals, assists, scores and slam dunks.  There’s no other valid response but to be impressed.

Of course, nobody thought to capture the nineties in HD, but the skills still shine through, and there’s some very strong nostalgia at play here.  It seems news readers were always filmed in very close frame, with lead images of their stories’ subjects selected solely for the extent to which they could be deemed unflattering.  Everybody chewed a great deal of gum (though this could be carrying on till now – I have no frame of reference) chomping away on great gobfuls.  Surely there were some bitten cheeks as the players careered up and down the court.  There’s a huge internet trend for people in their thirties to comment and post endlessly about how their lives and indeed the world peaked in the nineties.  The Last Dance corroborates this as I wistfully realised I had missed out on everything at the time.

The tension builds around the epic struggle to win that sixth championship, with my ignorance keeping me genuinely in the dark about what the outcome would be.  Even more captivating, though, is the incredible charismatic personality of Michael Jordan himself, outshone only by his sporting determination, work ethic and competitive spirit.  The Last Dance covers the team effort, but everything comes back to this one-man superstar whose global influence in a world before social media must have come with pressure beyond our imagining, and that’s before you factor in traumatic personal tragedy.  As we arrive at our poignant closing episode, the sense of time passing, of lost youths and changing lives, becomes almost unbearable and you wish that everything could just stand still.  Life is terrifying highs and dizzying lows, so how must it feel if your greatest peaks are in a bygone decade?  It’s moments like this that make you glad never to have achieved anything, as at least then you can write an irreverent weekly blog about other people’s successes and the documentaries that Netflix has made about them.

The Staircase

Deep in a second lockdown, the last thing you need while trying to account for lost income and no gyms (thanks, Bozza) is a tense and paranoia-inducing documentary about murder, guilt, loss and the flaws in any justice system.  I know this now.  But I didn’t when I decided the time had finally come for me to consume Netflix’s well-known thirteen-part series: The Staircase.  Previously, it had proven easy enough to ignore in the algorithm, particularly with such distractions as the second series of The End Of The F***ing World, a Wales-based attempt at I’m A Celebrity (works quite well, actually) and, thank goodness, despite its dilution by social distancing, Strictly Come Dancing.  Don’t even ask me about season four of The Crown – that will just have to wait (plus it’s not like my enjoyment is at risk from spoilers).  But no, podcast after podcast had conspired to reference The Staircase in heated discussion, bringing out my worst fear: boxset omission.  Here I am carefully curating all my viewing so I can chime in with any conversation, and yet I had missed what sounded like a bit of a classic.  Not that I can interrupt people while podcasting.  I’ve tried that before and they can’t actually hear you so there’s no point.

Potentially a poor man’s Making A Murderer, The Staircase looks like it’s going to offer you the same sort of did-he-didn’t-he, blow-by-blow account of an American crime as examined through the American justice system.  Indeed, both shows err on the side of the subject’s pleas of innocence, highlighting how courthouses are vulnerable to corruption, bias and unfairness, but while the Steven Amery case focuses on a low-income family whose only wealth is in the form of dilapidated cars, the clan at the centre of our story, by the look of their North Carolina mansion, seem to be drenched in riches.

But, they do have an awkwardly poky staircase, and it’s this part of the interior that forms the point of dispute driving the whole series’ narrative.  At the bottom of it, the body of Kathleen Peterson is found in 2001, covered in blood.  Is her tragic death an accidental fall, or the result of murder by her husband, Michael Peterson?  Either way, it’s his frantic calls to 911 that open our story.  It’s a chilling beginning and one seemingly designed to arouse suspicion immediately.  As the trial proceeds and we learn more about the Petersons’ happy family home, containing well turned-out children from previous marriages as well as some adopted daughters, we can only look on as the state brings a case against Michael and appears willing to play every trick to clinch a conviction.  We’re going back twenty years, so attitudes towards sexuality highlight an excess of narrow-mindedness.  Juror response research even yields free admissions that experts with Chinese accents aren’t easy to trust.  The odds stack up against Michael who, out on bail, potters about his large home drinking cans of Diet Coke while his legal team strategise.  He brings to mind an early-season Caitlyn Jenner in Keeping Up With The Kardashians, bemused by the goings on of the young people in the home but ultimately happy in some jogging bottoms.

It’s hard to discuss much more about the case without spoiling the plot.  I was hoping for references to an owl theory that had played out centrally in the podcast discussions that had driven me to the programme, but, unless I blacked out at very specific moments, I totally missed this.  Instead, over the course of many years, we watch a middle-aged man grow very old and suffer, eliciting natural sympathy no matter the verdict.  This is contrasted with the burning hatred that Kathleen’s surviving sisters have for him, which grows only stronger with time, giving some indication of the impetus behind his prosecution.  There’s uneasy viewing throughout, from graphic depictions of Kathleen after her fall to deeply skin-crawling testimonies in the courtroom.

As we progress, you develop a sense of melancholy from all the waste.  All the time, money, energy and emotion that goes into something like this, only for it never truly to be over, highlights the human damage and hopelessness such a case leaves in its wake.  Nothing can bring Kathleen back and nothing can make clear what really happened.  Our perspective is only ever really that of the accused, so sympathies naturally develop there, but nobody really wins.

The episodes each pivot around a singular development in the case, but we could potentially have zipped through some of them a bit more quickly to tighten up the documentary’s intensity.  The shaky footage from the early 2000s is hardly going to stress out your HD telly, but this is more of an unputdownable story than a visual feast by any stretch of the imagination.  In addition, the camerawork improves as the episodes shift focus nearer to the present day, particularly in the three final editions added by Netflix.  You’ll come away feeling uneasy, knowing what a blow poke is and questioning who gets to decide guilt and innocence, but at least you’ll be about thirteen hours closer to the end of a lockdown.

Seven Worlds, One Planet

Attenborough is back, and the BBC’s decision to schedule him in that Sunday evening slot makes drawing viewers as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.  However, shooting fish in a barrel is unethical and, probably, environmentally unsound, which means I am already making bad choices with metaphors and it’s only the second sentence of this week’s post.  If I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here can get with the times and acknowledge that insects shouldn’t be eaten alive for our entertainment, especially when the people eating them haven’t had proper telly careers for ages, then I can at least show our planet the respect that Seven Worlds, One Planet is very clear it deserves.  And by very clear, I mean smacking you in the face with it over and over throughout a single hour of television.  We’re at the height, here, of what TV can achieve.  Combining wildlife photography that easily stuns even the most soporific post-roast Sunday-evening eyeball into wholeheartedly acknowledging that everything ever on Earth is a miracle with undeniable demonstration of humans’ denigration of those miracles for our own gain, surely this programme will deliver the watershed moment where mankind stops it and tidies up?  (It being environmental naughtiness).

We all know something needs to happen, but our every subsequent action betrays a compromise of that truth.  I’m currently crawling through Connecticut on a train to Boston.  To reach the US, I generated a load of carbon emissions, but I’ll need to cross the Atlantic again by air to get back, so I already know I’ll be adding some more emissions.  I’m sorry.  Today’s been light on the old single-use plastics, yet I do have a bundle of garbage (American for rubbish) to throw in the trashcan (American for bin) when I reach my destination.  I’m sorry.  I stayed with a pal in New York whose building centrally regulates the heat for all apartments (American for flat).  The heating was therefore on too high and couldn’t be adjusted, but, no worries, the air conditioning kicked in to cool things down, burning energy at both ends in order to find the most energy-inefficient way to achieve room temp comfort.  We’re sorry.  So, can we rely on Sir David Attenborough to save the planet from climate change and plastic pollution?  The fact is, we shouldn’t have to.

Nevertheless, each episode of Seven Worlds, One Planet focuses on a different continent, detailing its unique and fragile ecological systems, so let’s review the story so far.

Antarctica

Penguins, seals and whales, with a backdrop of dramatically melting ice.  The guilt is woven in throughout, setting the tone for some uncomfortable viewing, but pulling no punches with the message that action is needed now.  We have facts and figures on population numbers that have dwindled or resurged at the hands of human activity, but there is retribution from Mother Nature when we see how seasick the production crew get as they sail to reach South Georgia.

Asia

Finally, a continent I have actually been to, though I am now of course racked with guilt at my carbon footprint following separate trips to China, Japan and South Korea.  This episode features the harrowing footage previously discussed on this blog from Netflix’s Our Planet: walruses falling to their deaths from Siberian cliffs.  Their plight is no less shocking this time around, though hopefully the BBC’s broader audience should draw greater attention to the living collateral damage my trips to the Far East have caused.  You’ll also weep for the orang-utan, both because this close cousin’s habitat is being destroyed so Iceland can make ads about it (I think) and because you’ll never pronounce the name of this animal correctly as it changes every few years.

South America

Never been here either, but we of course take time for the decades-old narrative about the disappearing rainforests.  This is chat that’s been in the media for such a long time that it’s become as easy to ignore as that rough-sleeper you walk past every morning on the way to work.  If, like me, the total number of hectares of virgin forest you have cleared personally in your lifetime is zero and you think that exculpates you, then you’re missing the point, you big silly.  But what do we do with the powerlessness we feel about the change we want to see?  This episode also delivers real novelty with animal behaviour never filmed before: pumas hunting guanacos.  I didn’t even know what guanacos were when the episode began, and now I am obsessed with them.

I’ll be catching up on Australasia once home, plus big player Africa is still to drop in the series.  I might confess early to expecting to be underwhelmed by Europe (the continent, not the political union we all want to stay in forever) as I’m not sure we can stretch foxes and squirrels out for an hour, but they might have found wilder cast members away from English suburbia.  Either way, this is the type of landmark content that makes me eager to pay my license fee (even if the BBC News app uses biased language to favour right-wing politics).  We can’t let down dear old David by carrying on as we have been doing.  I’m switching to Bulb, voting Green, shopping more at Co-op and haven’t put my heating on so far this year (mostly as I can’t work the new-fangled thermostat in my fancy newbuild) but these are drops in the plastic-filled ocean while New York is still giving out single-use plastic bags and I, ever the Millennial, jet about on fossil-fuelled aeroplanes.  Someone needs to stop me.  Someone needs to stop us.  Over to you, David.  We’ll do whatever you say.

Come Fly With Me

Ten blogposts later, I find myself drawn to Walliams and Lucas again.  This wasn’t planned.  I’m literally episodes away from finishing five series of Netflix’s first big boxset.  Celebrity Big Brother is back on and has, again, given drama more incredible than any scriptwriter could contrive.  We’ve even got more Great British Bake Off on the box.  But suddenly, I saw Come Fly With Me on the Netflix menu and, before I knew it, I had clicked play, devoured a whole episode, enjoyed it more than anything else in recent times, let the next one autoplay, and then, over the next few nights, raced through all six instalments.  Do I have any regrets?  No.  This is exactly how I pictured adult life: feeling guilty about not doing something more interesting while watching old sketch shows I have already seen before.

Come Fly With Me was brought out with huge fuss onto BBC1’s primetime schedule in 2010.  Little Britain had, as I have previously blogged (keep up!), become a cultural phenomenon.  Today, we might know David Walliams as Roald Dahl 2.0, dominating the top ten children’s books on Amazon, allowing me to delight my niece by reading her stories about grandmas that fart and grandads that fart as well (because toilet humour sells), and we might see Matt Lucas…  well, I know he was in Bridesmaids and that was funny.  In fact, the last time I saw him was in a café in central London.  He was wearing quite an interesting hat.  Seated nearby with friends I hadn’t seen for ages, I made sure to be as loud and funny as possible, expecting him to rush over and offer me my own broadcast platform for my incredible comedy.  He actually just rushed past, even though we had left our bags in the way as obstacles for him in a ridiculous attempt to increase our chances of attracting his attention.  Sorry Matt.  But yes, how do you follow up Little Britain?  Well, you basically can’t.

And you especially can’t if, in 2010, you choose to parody a show that was last culturally significant in 2005 (the BBC documentary, Airport).  Sure, airports are lame no matter what the year, but coming along with a mockumentary treatment five years later was never going to get the appreciation it deserved.  But now, with a bit of time and distance, we can look at things differently (even though we will still be outraged by some of the hair and make-up choices used to create the pair’s non-white characters).  The fact is: airports are ridiculous.  You just go there to wait to go somewhere else.  It’s either a work trip you don’t want to be on or a holiday where you can’t wait to get away.  It’s one queue after the other while you haemorrhage cash in a way you never would in real life.  This is because you have entered vacation mode, where Monopoly money flows freely and treats must be procured because you deserve immediate gratification (or you can charge it to expenses).  I’m particularly fond of how panicked my parents’ generation get about going through security, convinced a half-used packet of paracetamol will land them on Indonesia’s death row.  I always like to see how much liquid I sneak into my hand luggage, just to check the scanners.

In conclusion, all this nonsense makes for a great documentary.  There is no worse race in the world than British people abroad, so Airport’s mix of put-upon staff and dreadful, dreadful customers was a winning formula.  All Walliams and Lucas needed to do was make a few tweaks to bring Come Fly With Me to life.  People probably just thought it was a real documentary, what with characters like Jeremy Spake making himself a household name in the original.  I can still hear him urging me to go down to my local Euronics centre, yet I, to this day, have no idea what a local Euronics centre is.  His wide, goateed face would dash about the terminals solving problems and whipping out an impressive command of the Russian language to get stuff done.

Cue Moses Deacon, a Walliams character who surely owes Spake for his genesis.  Instead of being effective, however, he is useless and selfish, if you’ll pardon the pun (because one of his main jokes is asking viewers to pardon puns he hasn’t actually made).  Prancing down a staircase, collecting money for his charity WishWings (of which his gaycations are the main beneficiary) or getting taken for a ride by an elderly lady falsely claiming she has never flown before (Matt Lucas in epic prosthetics), this character deftly brings us into the world of Come Fly With Me’s busy airport.  And that world is nothing if not richly imagined.  And by richly imagined, I mean they have literally come up with three fake airlines that might remind you of real ones:

FlyLo

Garish colours.  Low-cost fares.  Appalling service.  Run by a foreign chap.  Could it be any more easyJet?  There’s Taaj in the ground crew who qualifies each sentence by asking “isn’t it?” and uses the in-terminal transport to try and pick up bitches.  A highlight for me is Liverpudlian Keeley on check in (“Hello, checchh in; Keeley speacchhing”), whose passive aggressive rivalry with Melody never stops either of them taking delight in telling passengers they are too fat to fly or explaining that FlyLo’s Barcelona route in fact lands in Barcelona Shannon, requiring ferry and coach transfers from Ireland to reach Spain, but all in good time for your evening meal, even if that meal is in a few days’ time.  The planes even have pay-as-you-go life jackets.

Our Lady Air

Ryanair doesn’t come away unscathed either.  We meet Fearghal, fulfilling all the air steward stereotypes, not to mention his nine gay brothers (although Finbar is bi).  Willing to give an allergic man peanuts, simply so he can increase his chances of winning Steward of the Year by saving his life, he also has a staunch approach to faiths that aren’t Catholic.

Great British Air

One of the main jokes here is Penny, the snobby first class stewardess who thinks that people in economy are scum.  Having frequently travelled economy, I can confirm this.  Having also travelled in business (not quite first class, and only because I was on standby thanks to a friend) I can also confirm that the staff are snobby.  There’s also the well-observed married couple, Simon and Jackie Trent, who happily let the underlying hatred within their marriage spill out over the in-flight comms system.

Away from the airlines, Peter and Judith Surname are among the best passengers, frequently experiencing holidays from hell which they recount with vivid imagery.  Unfortunate to suffer the disasters that befall them, it’s their plucky British approach to making the best of things that strikes a chord, even if this does lead Judith to BBQ Peter’s leg for sustenance after they survive a plane crash in the Andes.  Even though they are rescued within half an hour.

So, yeah, it will feel dated.  You’ll cringe at characters like Precious Little and the Japanese fans of Martin Clunes.  But for a mindless brain massage after a full day’s rat racing, you can’t beat the minimal attention requirements of a sketch show, particularly one that has layers and layers of familiarity.  You’ll recognise your own awful holiday behaviour.  And, worst of all, you’ll want to book yourself a holiday and perpetuate the cycle of airports being rubbish, and people making shows about them, and then people writing blogposts about them.

Wild Wild Country

If you hover over a show for too long on Netflix, the trailer automatically starts playing before you know what you’ve done with your fat fingers.  If it’s something they’ve bought in, you get an odd array of clips with some incongruous music.  However, Netflix’s own shows have lovingly crafted pieces that leave you in no doubt that your life is now not worth living till you’ve seen every series of the programme in question.  This was how I felt about Wild Wild Country after its sudden appearance in the Recently Added menu.  It had conflict, mystery and maybe some nudity – and it really happened.  On it went, along with a million other things, to the watchlist.  Then, someone at work went and described it as unmissable.  Being easily swayed, it got bumped up the list.  I’ve now sat through all six episodes (just over an hour long each) and now I can write down what I thought about it in this silly little blog.  Let’s read on.  Everyone.  Please.

If, like me, you’re a mid-eighties baby, you might not have heard of the Rajneeshees.  This is the name for followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian spiritual leader whose approach to meditation and rolling around naked with pals and strangers garnered him an international set of followers.  They’re easy to spot in the documentary as they only wear clothes in shades of red, though some daringly branch out into purples, pinks and oranges.  His movement carries on to this day with books, communes and meditation retreats, but back in the early eighties, the organisation acquired land in rural Oregon to found, build and run a whole utopian city based on his teachings.  Now, the only bit of Oregon I’ve been to is Portland, a very liberal city with posters for vegan breastfeeding in its hipster grocery stores, but parts of the state are more conservative and rural.  And they don’t seem to like red clothes.  Thus Wild Wild Country opens by taking us on the journey of how Rajneesh’s movement came to be and how the neighbours responded when thousands of it followers rocked up in smalltown USA.

From then on, we weave our way through a whiplash-inducing storyline of the conflict between the government and the Rajneeshees.  Should they be allowed to overrun the nearby town of Antelope in order to dominate local elections?  Is it ok to build a city in the middle of disused land if you don’t have all the planning permissions?  What do you expect retired conservatives to think about a group of people who have an open-minded (and maybe open-legged) policy to marriage?  The neighbourly love soon runs out, with both sides hunkering down to outstay the other.  But this is very much the beauty of the documentary: you’ll change sides over and over again.  Like Making A Murderer, you’ll never be certain who’s wrong and who’s right.  Part of this comes down to not knowing which side is worse than the other, especially as things get more and more curious with weapons hoarding and alleged food poisoning attacks.  The narrative deliberately creates sympathy with one faction before taking it away and placing it with the other.

This is because the key contributors to the piece are those that lived through it most closely.  Events are told through the eyes of devoted Rajneeshees who themselves rose to the ranks of the organisation’s leadership.  Ma Anand Sheela today comes across like the cheeky grandma who tells it like it is at family events, but in her youth she was a bouffanted hardcase.  As Bhagwan’s personal secretary, she defended her people with devotion.  Despite admiring her fluency in English, you can really enjoy her use of idioms where she skips out the odd the or a, masking the real danger she posed with a bit of cuteness.  It’s through Jane Stork (Ma Shanti Bhadra) and Philip Toelkes (Swami Prem Niren) that you really get a palpable sense of the movement’s power over the individual.  Perhaps these core players’ experiences could have been complemented with perspectives from more incidental contemporaries.  Reams of stock footage show the thousands of followers – who were they and what are they doing now?  In particular, what of the street people who were bussed in from US cities to boost numbers?

Either way, there is a lot of footage of them.  These people seemed to film everything that the news cameras weren’t already covering.  Imagine how annoying their Instagram accounts would be today!  I was incredulous that so much footage could exist of something I’ve never heard of, (but then I’ve never watched Sky Sports and I’m told there’s literally non-stop team ball action on there), and I suspect that some of it has been made to look older to fit in with the sinister tone the documentary sets throughout (almost everything has a distortion line near the top), but plenty of it is a bit creepy in its own right, and not just because of the ill-advised eighties haircuts.

Most creepily portrayed is Bhagwan himself.  He only has himself to blame: he almost never blinks, he matches an array of tinsel-like woolly hats with Star Trek-esque tunics and he insists on sitting on this reclining throne with his legs crossed, making him look like someone’s dad watching daytime telly.  His sleepy and heavily accented speech (his Ts are drawn out more than you’d expect) emphasises the effect.  Either way, it’s clear he had a profound effect on his followers’ lives.  As someone who was born and raised heathen, I’ve never understood the need for organised religion.  If you can’t work out right and wrong for yourself, then there’s really no hope.  Deep.

But, after all, these people obviously needed something in their lives that he provided.  A lot of them really did have bad haircuts, so we can easily imagine the suffering.  Therefore, I urge you, take the journey with this show.  While the narrative avoids some specifics, such as exact dates and times, and numbers of followers and inhabitants, it does artfully cover the movement’s rise to be a focus for international news.  Rather than one individual crisis and crescendo, there are multiple steps in this horrid saga.  When it’s all over, you’ll feel both vindication and sympathy.  Sometimes real life can create the strangest boxset of all.

Making A Murderer

If you’re looking for something to watch while waiting at home until it’s time to go to Heathrow for your evening flight to Cape Town, nervous about your first trip to Africa, apprehensive about the eleven and a half hours in economy, worried about having to wait around Cape Town airport for your next two-hour flight to Pietermaritzburg and suddenly regretting your decision to go alone, don’t watch Making A Murderer.  Going through an airport is tense enough.  What have you forgotten?  Did you accidentally pack an incendiary device in your hand luggage?  Where is your passport?  What if the Tube train gets stuck and you miss the flight?  While Netflix bingeing can provide a welcome escape from these tedious stressors in life, Making A Murderer will only amplify them as it turns the screw episode by irresistible episode until you’re terrified ever to leave the house again.

But yes, it’s a documentary and we’ve not really covered one of them before.  This means it’s all true and about real things and doesn’t contain any attractive acting talent.  The story begins way back in the eighties and takes us right up to 2015 when the show first appeared on Netflix.  Steven Avery is at the heart of goings on, and these goings on revolve around a number of crimes he is accused of and whether he actually did them.  I can’t say more without giving away too much of the storyline’s tension – episode one draws you straight in so go and click play immediately and that will save me the time of regurgitating what happens.

Our setting is Wisconsin, so we’re talking Fargo country here.  We have the accents, which charm throughout, and we also have lots of wistful shots of various buildings relating to law enforcement covered in snow.  But there’s nothing sexy about this. In fact, the name of the county most of this took place in, Manitowoc, is perhaps one of the sexiest things in the whole series.  It’s a fun word to say and conjures up all sorts of imagery of the American wilderness.  Now let’s compare this to the name of the equivalent local government I grew up in here in the UK: Mole Valley.  Even the unsexy parts of the USA are sexier than England.

Anyway, the key point here is that this documentary will reel you in quickly and then not let you go until there’s none left.  Is it entertainment?  In a sick way, yes.  But it’s also deeply interesting and your reaction will be strong – each episode compounds the galling effect of the previous one.  Later episodes show highlights from hundreds of hours’ worth of real courtroom action, and the editing gives it such pacing that you may doubt this isn’t a very realistic drama.  Nevertheless, it’s not quite a romp to the finish, as the trials’ endlessness is hard to avoid, but luckily I have watched enough of How To Get Away With Murder to know exactly what’s going on.

Criticism has been levelled that the programme only shows one side of the story, and you won’t be able to escape wondering if you really have been given the whole picture.  Prosecution lawyer, Ken Kratz, doesn’t seem to be the type of man (or to have the type of haircut) that anyone can trust, let alone twelve people on a jury, but it is gratifying to know he was accused of sexting female clients later on.  Indeed, Kratz as a physical specimen is at the very heart of the show’s unsexiness.

But lo, we are shown the press conferences that took place after each part of the trial.  Among the journalists, there is a surprise handsome individual.  We began to refer to him as sexy journalist.  To his left and right are buck teeth, bad hair, double chins and doughy complexions.  Never have matinée idol looks seemed so out of placed.  While Ken Kratz oozes slime, this guy gives you appearance goals like you’ve never expected: silver fox hair and a jawline carved from granite.  It’s like a bit of Hollywood has been dropped into Manitowoc accidentally.

So when should you watch something so harrowing?  Save it for when you get back from the most amazing trip to South Africa, for when you need to decompress yourself from the sunshine and relaxation so that you can again reacclimatise to the cold, the wet, and the awful people getting in your way on public transport because they can’t tear their eyes away from their smartphones.  After all, at least you’re not in prison.